This is the second time I’ve written this post. The first time, I started to go into a huge explanation so that everyone could understand this idea before realizing that anyone who didn’t already understand the issues had a 0% chance of caring about the idea anyway. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then this post is not for you.

With all the hype/concern/backlash/misinformation-fueled legislation in the world around cookies and their use in the browser, I think it’s only a matter of time before analytics and ad tech are going to have to figure out a non-cookie dependent solution for measuring web usage and delivering relevant ads to interested consumers.

It’s really a value proposition problem. The consumer doesn’t see the value of sharing data, and rather than showing them the value, corporations have essentially tried to figure out ways to collect the consumer’s data anyway, just without letting them know about it.

So here’s the straightforward and transparent plan:

Convince a group of consumers to maintain a profile with accurate demographic & behavioral information

Have the group create a list of things/categories they’re interested in seeing ads/offers for

Find a group of product makers who will divert some of their ridiculous marketing budgets into discounts

Play matchmaker between the interested consumers and the products being offered by product makers

Sell the product to the interested consumer at a discount

The consumer gets a great deal on the thing they already want/need. The product maker sells the thing that they wanted to sell to an interested person and didn’t waste money telling 1M people at $10CPM that didn’t care about the thing they were selling. An ongoing relationship is formed between the consumer and the product maker that provides value to both parties.

As long as the consumer remains interested in the category (as determined by their up to date profile), the product maker is free to continue to make offers to the consumer at the same discounted rate or normal pricing. There would obviously be a pricing strategy – which I know nothing about – that would determine their ultimate offers to repeat customers.

Everyone makes informed decisions, no one is tricked, and no regulated/illegal cookies are involved in the mutually beneficial transaction.

Often times, I sit down in the evening and wonder what I should watch. I have a Netflix subscription, I can buy stuff Video on Demand from Amazon or from Apple. Of course there’s access to Hulu and none of those is good enough, you can try Vudu or Crackle. Or maybe I just want to watch something that I already own. But I want to watch something funny with George Clooney in it. Or maybe I I’m in the mood for an action movie with Angelina Jolie or that guy that plays Captain America. I want to watch it in HD and I want to stream it, because I’m not waiting for the disc in the mail.

Does Netflix have something I want? Is it available for streaming? Can’t find anything on Netflix (can anyone?), so let me go look at Apple. Or Amazon. Can I rent it? Can I buy it? Is it availble in HD? Which one is cheaper? By the time you’ve gone through all this, sometimes I’ve just decided it’s not worth the trouble. So here’s the idea. A single site where I can punch in a title or an actor, and it will search all of these places for me. I can filter the results down by streaming, by rent or buy, by HD quality, by price, by genre, by just about anything I want.

And then I can click a link and go buy/rent/stream whatever I decided on.

Today, I setup a couple of WordPress plugins for automatically posting blog links to Facebook and Twitter.

WP to Twitter

The first is WP to Twitter. Instructions are pretty straightforward for creating a Twitter app for integration. Small hitch was that after creating my Access Token I had to reload the page in order for the access tokens to actually show up. Now whenever I create a new post, it will post a Tweet using my Twitter account with a link back to my post. Bit.ly integration is supported, WP tags are converted to Twitter hashtags and there are a few other options as well.

Add Link to Facebook

The second plugin is Add Link to Facebook. The name of this one is somewhat of a misnomer because it does way more than just add links. It appears to integrate blog comments and Facebook comments as well as a host of other features. For now, I’m only planning on using it to post links, but I will probably explore some of the other features later on.

Setup for this one was a bit more complicated. The plugin page has a setup guide as well as an FAQ. When attempting to authorize the application within the WP setup, I kept getting a redirect_uri error on setup end eventually ended up deleting the plugin, deleting the Facebook app I had created and starting from scratch a second time. The second time through creating the Facebook app I caught a message that said the app had been created, but could take “several minutes” to replicate across their servers.

I decided to wait for awhile. After 15 minutes or so, I was still receiving the error, so I went to play Legend of Zelda for awhile, and tried again an hour or so later. This time, it went to Facebook and authorized just fine, and now I’m just playing with different settings.

This idea stems from a recent article I read about global warming in which Bob Lutz (big car guy formerly of GM, Chrysler, Ford, and BMW) insists that it’s a bunch of garbage and a scientist named Neil deGrasse Tyson tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

But Bob Lutz is not the only guy that insists it’s hokey, and Neil Tyson is not the only one saying it’s not. From what I can tell, the argument largely falls upon party lines with conservatives saying it’s junk and liberals saying it’s not. How are the moderates supposed to make up their minds?

So today’s idea is this: a site that covers all the major topics of controversy with opinions from both (all?) sides of the issue represented. The rules are:

You have to use your real identity to participate

Recognized experts in the field can post opinion pieces to represent the different viewpoints on the issue (limited to 2 pages, so you really have to distill your content to the bare bones)

Constructive comments are allowed on all primary opinions to encourage dialog

Neutral moderators summarize the opinion pieces from the different sides

Participants can choose a side to support and only then can they vote on the best arguments & supporting facts for that side (you can’t downvote the opposition)

Issues are presented in a simple format with the summaries from all sides visible up front and you can dive into individual arguments from there

Those who have not yet formed their opinions now have a resource of information where they can go and read the best arguments from each side and make up their own minds. It’s like a political kaleidoscope. Single issue in focus and you can see all the different facets. Maybe a diamond or gemstone would be a better analogy, but I really like this kaleidoscope picture.

The Motorola Atrix Laptop Dock orginally debuted at a price of $500 a little less than a year ago. Disappointing sales figures led to discounts and today you can now get them on AT&T’s site for 1/10 of that price.

But it is my opinion that this is a spectacular idea that simply failed in execution. This is the future of computing. One device to rule them all. Imagine the following scenarios:

On the way to work, you slide your phone into your car dashboard to power your larger in-dash display. Same connectivity, same apps, same device. It just has a bigger screen, integrates with your car’s sound system, and charges while you’re at it.

You get home from work and slide your phone inside a tablet device so that is’ completely covered (like the old 3.5″ disks that were completely swallowed up by the drive). Same connectivity, same apps + maybe more, same data, same device. Just better because the tablet gives you a bigger screen, more memory & storage, and longer battery life.

You carry around a 11 inch Ultrabook because it’s spectacularly portable, lightweight and has pretty great battery life. You love it, but it falls far short when you want more processing (work) or better graphics (play) or more screen real estate (anytime you’re not mobile). Now just drop it in the dock which has a hard drive and an external CPU and GPU connected to an array of 1920×1200 monitors or better. Same apps + more, same data + more, same device, just super-powered.

Take all these scenarios to the extreme and you take your phone and plug it into your tablet, your laptop, or your desktop dock and you have single device that meets all your needs for work, meets all your needs for play, bakes you cookies and tucks you in at night. I don’t think the right solution is the same looking interface for all devices, you’d need each interface to be appropriate for it’s current use. It needs to behave like a phone on it’s own and behave like a desktop when it’s docked with a GPU.

We’re slowly getting there. We have a long way to go, but slowly moves are being made in the right direction. If we can make it simpler to manage and hit the right price points, this stuff could take off in a big way. Besides the Atrix lapdock, here are a few other ideas that I think are moving in the right direction.

Ubuntu for Android: “When in your pocket the phone is the same as it always was: an Android device. But when the connected to a monitor (by way of a nifty looking dock) it launches into a fully fledged Ubuntu desktop running the Unity interface…Both OSes share the same kernel – so this isn’t a case of an ‘Ubuntu’ app running atop Android or vice versa. Both run at the same time on the same device.”

I imagine that Apple will be the first to pull this off in a big way. The iPhone that slides into the iPad. Or the iPad that turns into a Macbook Air (with real OS X) when you attach the keyboard. Or the iPad or Macbook Air that slides into the the Thunderbolt display that happens to have a GPU (and real OS X) and suddenly you have a glorious 27″ 2560×1440 resolution iMac.

Microsoft has bigger challenges on the hardware front, but appears to be ahead on the software front as it’s already figuring out the interface switching that would have to happen when you move from tablet mode to desktop mode.